According to Sahlberg, the most influential figure behind
Finland's achievements in education is the American philosopher
John Dewey, who is known for his seminal theories on education
and psychology. "Many Finnish schools have adopted Dewey's
view of education for democracy by enhancing students' access to
decision-making regarding their own lives and studying in
school," Sahlberg
wrote for the Washington Post in 2014.

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Sahlberg studied Dewey when he was a graduate student in Finland
in the 1980s, and many universities continue to rely on Dewey's
writing and the work of other American academics today.

Over time, the ideas have helped shape
the Finnish education system as one that prizes autonomy,
peer learning, collaboration, and varied forms of assessment.
These were all ideas developed at one time or another by American
theorists, yet modern American classrooms - noted for their heavy
reliance on tests and teacher-guided lectures - bear little
resemblance to those up north.

Consider the Finnish program known as Me & MyCity, a set of
projects designed to get kids thinking like entrepreneurs.
Through role-playing they learn financial literacy and gain an
understanding of how public and private funding works.

More than 70% of Finnish 6th-graders participate in Me &
MyCity, often to great success. Research presented at
the Association of European Economics Education conference in
August showed kids "clearly" gained economic knowledge from the
program, while 75% said they had a greater interest in economics,
reports Tim Walker for the Atlantic.

Me & MyCity took its early cues from BizTown, an American
program started by the organization Junior
Achievement, that had a similar mission of making kids
financially savvy. While BizTown has seen similar improvements,
no state has made it a curriculum requirement for schools to
teach the program.

Sahlberg says America's inability to make that leap - from pilot
programs to widespread implementation - stems from a key
difference in how America and Finland treat educational policy.

"Many of these good ideas actually stop in the school boards, who
may have completely different intentions for how to run the
schools in their own districts," Sahlberg says. "Overall,
education in the United States is much more political than it is
in Finland, where it's much more of a professional issue."

Finland implements policies based on their observed
effectiveness. It looks at outcomes and weighs the costs against
the benefits. And unlike America's education system, Finland
essentially has just one school board, the federal Ministry of Education
and Culture, which has near total oversight in which new policies
schools will adopt.

"I cannot find any other reason why these great ideas that
have been researched and clearly found to be effective in helping
young people to learn are not more widely implemented," Sahlberg
says.

He goes on to criticize the argument that America somehow
struggles to implement forward-thinking policies because of its
size. Finland is small, but its population of 5.4 million is
still greater than most US states.While the federal
government may struggle to pass creative policies, Sahlberg
believes states should be able to pick up the slack in the
aggregate.

"If anybody says that the United States as a whole cannot
take anything from smaller places like Finland or others," he
says, "then people should remember that America has 15,000 local
systems that all have enough autonomy to do these things if they
want to."